Hands-On Review: Samsung Galaxy S 4

The Lowdown

Samsung had a monster hit on its hands last year with the Galaxy S III, the first Android phone to give the iPhone a real run for its money in terms of sales. The new Galaxy S 4 (customer tolerance for Roman numerals apparently stops at III) doubles down on the formula of its predecessor: slim package, big screen, and tons of features. It launches April 24 on T-Mobile, April 27 on Sprint, April 30 on AT&T, and on Verizon at an unspecified later time. The phone will be available with either 16 GB or 32 GB of on-board storage and a starting price of $150 or $200, depending on carrier.

Hardware

Lay down the Galaxy S 4 next to a Galaxy S III and you'd be hard-pressed to pick them apart—until you turn them on. The 5-inch screen on the S 4 is even larger than the S III's, which, at 4.8 inches, was already pretty large. The S 4's larger screen fits in a frame that is ever-so-slightly smaller and thinner than the S III. In fact, the S 4 is almost all screen, with practically no bezel to speak of. That's a good thing, since its 1080p super AMOLED screen is bright and beautiful. It is nearly on par with the extraordinarily crisp screen on the HTC One, but far brighter and with better contrast and color saturation.

Aside from the screen, the design of the phone is unremarkable. It has a plastic back, a single hard home key on the bottom, and an illuminated menu and back capacitive keys that disappear when not in use. Samsung is sticking with a design that has worked for them, and company executives claim that the plastic back allows them and their customers greater flexibility for removable batteries and memory, and accessories such as the S-View cover, which serves as a replacement for the original back panel with an integrated screen protector, thus shielding the front glass without significantly increasing the thickness of the device. The S III had a similar cover, but this new one has a transparent panel that allows you to see information such as the time, the number of messages you have, and incoming calls. You can even accept an incoming call with a swipe right through the see-through panel, then start your conversation without completely opening the phone.

Unlike its Android rival HTC, Samsung has not at all abandoned the race for more megapixels. The Galaxy S 4's built-in back camera has a 13-megapixel sensor, which really does take some stunning still shots, though much of the magic behind the S 4's camera comes from some cute software tricks (more about that later). There's also a 2-megapixel front camera, plus a variety of sensors that allow the phone to pay attention to you and let you engage with the device at varying distances from the screen (more on that in a moment as well).

Samsung also has the other must-have halo feature of 2013: an infrared blaster that allows it to function as a remote control for your television and other AV gear.

Software

While the Galaxy S 4 sticks with a hardware formula that has worked in the past, it also keeps with its successful software strategy: Pack in more features than any customer could discover in a human lifetime. The camera app alone has 13 modes, including automatic animated GIFs that let you select the parts of the picture that are in motion, a Drama mode that composes multiple action shots into one image, and an Eraser mode that turns multiple exposures into one image, removing anyone who is in motion—so long, photobombers! Users can also shoot multiple speeds of slow-motion and fast-motion video, merge the feed from the front and rear cameras for a single composed shot, or take photos with an attached audio clip.

Samsung has thrown a surprising amount of R&D into letting users interact with the S 4 without actually touching it. The phone's Air Gesture function uses infrared sensors that can detect sweeping gestures of your hands a few inches above the screen. You can use these gestures to answer the phone, move between photos in the gallery, or move up and down on a web page. Another feature, called Air View, lets you hover a finger a few millimeters above the screen over things like calendar items or emails for a pop-up peek at the information in the entry. Samsung has used this type of interaction in its Galaxy Note series of tablets and "phablets," but those devices used an electromagnetic resonance pen. The S 4 ups the sensitivity in its capacitive screen so that it can sense your finger approaching it (you can also use this increased sensitivity to make the phone work through gloves). Rounding out the "no-touch" UI trifecta is the Smart Screen eye-tracking technology that uses the front camera to watch you watching the screen. If you look away from a playing video, that video is paused. The screen will stay on as long as you are looking at it. And Web pages will scroll up and down in response to the tilt of your head.

All of this is very gee-whiz and guaranteed to blow the minds of your friends the first time they see it. But, at least for now, Samsung's new features are inconsistently applied (not every app works with every feature), and after a few days you find yourself turning a lot of it off. We found the Smart Screen tech particularly fidgety. Videos kept pausing while we tried to watch them, and the auto-scrolling feature turned reading a Web page into a constant fight with the device to keep the page still. The feature feels predicated on a notion that our gaze and eye movements are far more stable and linear than they really are. That said, we do see tremendous potential for the Air View feature—like mouse-over content on desktop computers, it lets you browse and move through menus in an efficient and useful way. Currently, though, it works in only a few apps, making it impossible to predict when extra Air View content will pop up.

When Samsung introduced its phone-to-phone content-sharing features, called Group Play, in the Galaxy S III, we loved the idea but thought it was a bit strange to presume all your friends would have Samsung phones. Since then, Samsung has sold so many Galaxy devices that it's not inconceivable that at least some of your friends would have one. For the S 4, Samsung has expanded Group Play to support collaboration on PowerPoint presentations, PDF and Word documents, and even games. There are some neat party tricks too, such as a music share that allows you to assign various phones within a group to play the part of right- and left-channel speakers. Unfortunately, this tech is also limited—at the moment only other S 4 devices can connect, though Samsung has committed to updating previous Galaxy devices such as the S III and Note II, which will vastly increase the universe of devices that can participate in all this sharing.

Samsung also invested time and effort in cleaning up and reorganizing its TouchWiz user interface that sits atop Android Jelly Bean. The most immediately useful change is an expanded set of instant setting icons in the drop-down notification panel. Now you can easily turn on or off 19 basic functions without digging through the Settings menu. Anyone who has used Samsung devices lately won't be overwhelmed by changes in the new UI.

Performance

Simply put, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 is the fastest, most powerful smartphone we've ever seen. It's got a 1.9 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 2 GB of RAM, and it pretty much outperforms every other phone on the market. We ran two standard benchmarking suites on it and the results were stunning. With the cross-platform Geekbench 2, we got a combined score of 3232. By comparison, the new HTC One scored 2712, the Samsung Galaxy Note II scored 1365, and the iPhone 5 scored 1660. Using AnTuTu Benchmark version 3.3, which focuses on the graphics processing unit, our Galaxy S 4 scored 24,925. Meanwhile, the HTC One scored a respectable 22,512, and the Note II scored a measly 12,676 (the AnTuTu benchmark for iPhone is slightly different, so the results aren't comparable).

What these numbers mean is fast, high-frame-rate, glitch-free performance in rich, graphical games such as Epoch and Asphalt 7, as well as smooth and speedy app launches and HD video playback. Samsung also put a bigger battery on the S 4 than the S III (though we didn't notice much of an improvement). Expect all-day battery life with moderate usage, two days on light usage, and plan a late-day charge break if you're a frequent video watcher and tweeter.

Conclusion

It seems indisputable that the Samsung Galaxy S 4 is the most advanced and powerful smartphone on the market. But the big question for us is: What does that really mean? The Galaxy S 4 can do things out of the box that no other phone can do. (Did we mention it can translate voice files and images of text back and forth between multiple languages?) But it's worth noting that much of the functionality built into the S 4 can be added to other smartphones through apps. (Google Translate does the translation thing pretty well.) And many of the features that are unique to the S 4 are cool the first time you try them, but start to feel like novelties over time. In fact, we can't help but wonder how long Samsung can continue cramming more features into its next-generation devices. What on earth could be left for a phone to do?

The Galaxy S 4 is a genuinely satisfying device to use—the size and clarity of the screen alone give it an edge over the rest of the top-tier smartphones. But the device is not such a technological masterpiece that you should be buying your way out of a 2-year contract and ditching a perfectly good device from last year to get your hands on it. That would just be silly.

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